Tag Archives: The Guardian

Amazon may have lower prices, but it can never replace a real shop with a book lover on hand to guide us When asked to think of a bookshop, most of us are likely to conjure up an ineffable sense of calm and cosiness, a general notion of wisdom and aspiration, rather than an…

After almost 600 booksellers withdrew 3.5m books from the secondhand marketplace in support of countries dropped by the website, it apologises for a ‘bad decision’ An “extraordinary and unprecedented” global protest from antiquarian booksellers has forced the Amazon-owned secondhand marketplace AbeBooks to backtrack on its decision to pull out of several countries. AbeBooks had told…

How to Eat delivered far more than recipes. It is intimate, confessional and offers a practical philosophy on how to enjoy food The joy of doing it right … Nigella Lawson, pictured in 2005. Photograph: ITV Plc What makes a cookbook a classic? Immediately we think of the recipes; all that delicious food, easy to…

Funny, literary and irreverent, How to Eat reinvented the cookbook. Twenty years on, Bee Wilson explores how Nigella Lawson’s evocative, appetite-driven food writing influenced a generation Nigella Lawson, pictured in 2001. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian “Strangely, it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palate, follow your own instincts.” When I first read these…

When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones;…

No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting? By Jacob Mikanowski On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and…

Journalist and author who won a name as a brilliant satirist with the ‘novel of the 1980s’, The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe’s sartorial fireworks fitted in well with his eccentric literary style. Photograph: Deborah Feingold/Getty Images The writer Tom Wolfe, who has died aged 88, was a great dandy, both in his elaborate dress…

Many ‘American’ phrases are actually British but a new book argues why we say what we say reveals a lot about our cultures To those dedicated warriors hunched over their keyboards or gripping their pens, ready to fire off an angry salvo about the Americanization of British English to their favorite newspaper, television channel…